US Politics
Howard Lutnick addresses Trump’s ‘mathematically impossible’ claim he’s cutting drug prices by 600% during Fox News grilling
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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has attempted to explain President Donald Trump’s “mathematically impossible” claim that he is cutting drug prices by up to 600 percent after being grilled by a Fox News host.
During Trump’s Wednesday night address to the nation, where he pushed a number of mistruths and exaggerations, the president claimed he has negotiated with drug companies to cut prices by “as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent.”
Reducing costs by 100 percent would mean that a customer gets their medication for free, a fact host John Roberts put to Lutnick on Fox News.
“Well, if you cut something by 100 percent, the cost goes down to zero,” Roberts said. “If you cut it by four or five or 600 percent, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product. So it raises the question, how much of last night’s speech was hyperbole and how much was fact?”
Lutnick let out a laugh during the question and said “no.” He said that the figures “depend on when you look at it.”
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“What he’s saying is…if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13 right? If you’re looking at it from $13 it’s down seven times…” Lutnick attempted to explain in a rambling response.
“It’s 700 percent higher [than] before, it’s down 700 percent now, right? So $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one,” Lutnick continued. “So it all depends on when you look at it.
“You could say it’s down 87 percent or you could say…it would have to go up 700 percent to be the same one. So it just depends on what you look at it,” he repeated. “But basically what he’s saying, and we all know what he’s saying, is we are hammering the price of drugs down.”
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Claims made in Trump’s 18-minute primetime address were fact-checked far and wide, including by CNN’s Daniel Dale, who called him out for “repeating the same core batch of lies.”
Dale said that most of the false claims made by the president during the address had been debunked before.
During the address, Trump blamed former President Joe Biden for the current economic woes, rising housing costs, lamented what he called a “colossal border invasion,” and falsely claimed inflation was “the worst in 48 years” when he took office in January.
Several networks cleared their schedules to air the speech live.
